Crusader's Coliseum - Gladiatorial Combat Without the Annoyance of Arenas

I've decided to start a thread here to provide a place for questions and/or strats for the new raid instance introduced in Patch 3.2. This thread is for the discussion of encounters found within the Coliseum. Please take special note of the posting guidelines laid out by Vykromond in the sticky at the top of this forum. Those who can't follow the rules get the same treatment they always have. Blizzard might nerf encounters but EJ rarely nerfs their moderators.

On with the show.

Patch 3.2 has introduced several new mechanics for the Crusaders Coliseum Dungeon and Raid instance. This thread is for discussion of the raid instance but I feel some clarification needs to be made here involving how to determine what instance you are entering and how to get there. First off, the purple portal leads to the 5-man dungeon content and the green portal (near the T9 vendors) leads to the raid content. There are also new and changed menu options for the raids themselves that determine what kind of group you are forming and what level of difficulty you will be tackling. This menu option system may be new but should be fairly self-explanitory once you have seen it.

[table]Dungeons|Â»|5 Player NormalÂ»|5 Player HeroicRaids| Â»|10 Player NormalÂ»|10 Player HeroicÂ»|25 Player NormalÂ»|25 Player Heroic[/table]

The normal 5man has no lockout and the heroic 5man works on the same 1-day lockout as other heroic dungeons. Each of the 4 raid options has a seperate lockout.

Dungeon play is known as "Trial of the Champion." Normal modes of raid play are known as "Trial of the Crusader" and heroic modes of raid play are known as "Trial of the Grand Crusader." Someone in your raid must have completed the normal mode raid in order to activate the heroic mode raid; this applies to both 10 and 25 player versions.

At this point, normal mode bosses are being introduced at a rate of 1 per week. This means the heroic mode of the encounters will not be available for play until the 5th week of resets, meaning the earliest anyone could attempt any of the heroic modes would be September 1, 2009 after having cleared the last boss of normal mode. It is assumed that all heroic mode bosses will be available for play at that time. This means no heroic mode discussion until September 15; heroic modes discussion may technically be open for all bosses at that point but I feel the discussion rules may amended by then depending on the difficulty of the encounters.

The bosses for the raid instance are as follows:

Northrend Beasts (unlocked Aug 4)

Gormok the Impaler

Acidmaw and Dreadscale (Two Jormungar)

Icehowl

Lord Jaraxxus (unlocked Aug 11)

Faction Champions (unlocked Aug 18)

Twin Val'kyr (unlocked Aug 25)

Anub'arak (unlocked Sep 1)

As of writing this, only the Northrend Beasts have been opened for combat. Talking to the NPC will reveal that the others are not ready yet.

After taking the Beasts in 10s tonight, a few of us decided to do the heroic Trial of the Coliseum and farm the normal mode to get more information. Here's what we learned.

ENCOUNTER 1: THE FACTION CHAMPIONS

After a lengthy introduction that can take longer than the rest of the instance, three random champions of the opposite faction enter with their entourages. There are three trash waves of three mobs, easily smacked down. After that you joust with the champions, who are basically the same as Commanders from the Citadel joust. If you lose your mount in this phase, don't worry - you can remount at the edge of the room. Of course, if it takes you too long to take down the second and third champions they will remount as well, but this should not be a problem for a coordinated group.

We chose to unseat the champions in the order that they entered, but doing it in the order you plan to kill them works too. It's not particularly hard, and if you die you can run back in and remount.

Once the champions are all downed, you dismount and re-equip your normal weapons to fight them hand to hand. Each champion is of a different class. I haven't seen the Alliance champions, but the Horde champions are as follows:

Blood Elf: Mage, spams Fireball, will sometimes use Polymorph.Undead: Rogue, uses Deadly Poison and drops poison clouds.Troll: Hunter, haven't really seen him use any abilities. Has no pet.Orc: Warrior, uses Mortal Strike and Whirlwind.Tauren: Shaman, has been seen using Chain Lightning and a spell called Hex of Mending (effect unknown, we interrupted it).

All champions can be stunned. My personal recommendation is to kill targets in ascending order of squishiness unless you get the Rogue/Mage/Warrior combo. When this happens, I suggest you kill the Rogue first to avoid a perfect storm of abilities on the tank.

There is an apparent bug in this encounter where the champions can respawn before you finish jousting, and start randomly DPSing group members before the tank can pick them up. This is how we found out that if you wipe in Phase 2, you don't have to repeat Phase 1.

ENCOUNTER 2: THE ARGENT CHAMPION

This will be one of two random encounters: Paletress or Eadric the Pure. Before you fight the boss you must deal with three trash packs consisting of a Priestess, Lightwielder and Monk that should be killed in that order - the Priestess heals, and if the Monk is not killed last he bubbles for 6 seconds at 1HP and waits for a heal from one of the others. You come out of combat between packs.

Eadric is a simple tank and spank. He uses a modified Hammer of Justice with a DPS component added to the stun, and a special ability called Radiance that is indicated by a rather obvious emote. Radiance blinds anyone facing Eadric when it resolves; I don't know exactly how long for as we rarely got hit and we cleansed the one or two people affected right away. The debuff is Magic.

Paletress is more complex and a tougher fight. She fights as a Holy Paladin-cum-Priest and has very low health. However, when she reaches 1HP she bubbles and summons one of 30 or so different bosses from previous content. She remains immune to damage while you DPS the add, and heals as you fight. The summoned add does not appear to use any of its own abilities, instead using Waking Nightmare (a raid-wide fear ability, can be EMFH'd and probably trinketed) and Shadows of the Past, a Magic debuff that we cleansed before we could find out what it did - sorry. Once the add is down, Paletress drops her bubble and you just DPS her down.

ENCOUNTER 3: THE BLACK KNIGHT

This is a three phase fight, and you must kill the Knight in each phase. In Phase 1 he spams diseases on the tank and also spawns a ghoul pet with around 70k health that should be DPSed down. Keep the tank cleansed and make sure the add is killed quickly when it gets low on health, as it starts to explode at 20%.

Phase 2 starts with the Knight casting Army of the Dead. The 8 or 10 adds that spawn need to be picked up by the tank and AOEd down; they have about 30k health each. The Knight also casts Desecration, a ground-based AOE that you need to stay out of. It's a fairly simple phase, though if you have a Druid tank and no Paladin or DK to pick up adds it could be tricky.

Phase 3 is a straight race to the finish. The Knight spams a shadow damage ability called Death's Bite on the party, which does about 2k damage before resists and increases magic damage taken by 5% for 15 seconds. This debuff stacks, so the damage will ramp up if you don't kill the boss quickly. In addition, he casts a second ability called Marked For Death on one or more party members that increases magic damage taken by 200% for 10 seconds. The person with this debuff will need big heals; they can be taking as much as 11k damage per hit towards the end of the fight. Save all CDs for this phase.

Of course, if it takes you too long to take down the second and third champions they will remount as well, but this should not be a problem for a coordinated group.

After they've been dismounted, you can simply "trample" them with your mount to keep them face down in the dirt. If you trample them as they RP walk to a new mount, there will be an emote that indicates this as they faceplant (again).

Of course, if it takes you too long to take down the second and third champions they will remount as well, but this should not be a problem for a coordinated group.

This will be one of two random encounters: Paletress or Eadric the Pure. Before you fight the boss you must deal with three trash packs consisting of a Priestess, Lightwielder and Monk that should be killed in that order - the Priestess heals, and if the Monk is not killed last he bubbles for 6 seconds at 1HP and waits for a heal from one of the others. You come out of combat between packs.

You can prevent the champions from remounting/getting back up by trampling them with your own mount. i.e. Just spend some time standing over them until you get the emote saying the champion was trampled. They in return can do the same to you and kill you by trampling.

On heroic, the Priestess of the trash mobs casts Mind Control as her final spell. This is worth interrupting, as we found out the hard way.

After taking the Beasts in 10s tonight, a few of us decided to do the heroic Trial of the Coliseum and farm the normal mode to get more information. Here's what we learned.

The summoned add does not appear to use any of its own abilities, instead using Waking Nightmare (a raid-wide fear ability, can be EMFH'd and probably trinketed)

I snipped the extensive and very useful summary of the 5-man content. Thought that a confirmation of the assumption quoted above would be useful for the community. A pvp trinket does work, as was theorised, to break the Waking Nightmare.

Eadric is a simple tank and spank. He uses a modified Hammer of Justice with a DPS component added to the stun, and a special ability called Radiance that is indicated by a rather obvious emote. Radiance blinds anyone facing Eadric when it resolves; I don't know exactly how long for as we rarely got hit and we cleansed the one or two people affected right away. The debuff is Magic.

If you dispel Eadric's Hammer of Justice before the person is hit with his thrown hammer (or break the stun in some other way) then the victim will catch his hammer, and their hotbar will change so the "1" key will throw the hammer back at Eadric, dealing 16k damage. There is an achievement for dealing the killing blow to Eadric in this fashion. Radiance is either 4 or 5 seconds of blind, with a 6k damage component.

Once the champions are all downed, you dismount and re-equip your normal weapons to fight them hand to hand.

The transition can be a bit rough if your jousters are spread out, as you don't have long at all for the tank to pick up all three adds. It's worth being careful how you dismount them, and if they're widely spread drag the third one into clear space and stack up for the dismount - otherwise someone's likely to get smashed.

In the same way, make sure people don't go near Eadric or Paletress while taking down the adds - I watched a warlock stand right on Eadric while AOEing down the third pack, only to get two-shot as soon as the last add died.

There seem to be some LOS issues with the area near the large doors. Occasionally someone tanking Eadric or the champions in the gap in the wall would suddenly become out of LOS and healing for me (located straight towards the centre of the room) - easy to avoid by tanking within the circle of the walls instead.

Paletress's Shadows of the Past is a 90% cast slow debuff - quite a surprise to heal through.

The Blood Elf also casts a haste-style buff similar to the Nexus mobs; is spellstealable/dispellable. The Troll has a buff with a cast time that looks like he's casting a cloud storm etc, basically enchants his ranged attacks to do a few thousand additional lightning damage, it's interruptable, and also spellstealable/dispellable.

Paletress' renew needs to be dispelled/stolen aswell when cast on the memory, on normal it heals for 17k per tick. If you're in a pug/not-strong dps group, it can be killer.

I think it's already been mentioned, but will just reiterate that it's good during jousting to dismount/trample in the middle of the arena, it makes dealing with re-trampling much easier and the tanks job is alot simpler too. Not everyone is a great tank, and even those that are won't neccessarily be able to do much with 3 mobs going for 3 different people all over the arena.

Also on normal mode, don't forget you can zone in during boss fights if you die *cough*

To add: the Shaman in P1 will cast a Healing Wave as well, the Mage will cast a Blastwave.

We had an entertaining bug in P1 - we defeated all three of the Champions, got the chest and the Mage got up again and started Fireballing people. She reset to the Jousting effort, where she'd drop and then try to mount up on the wolves that were nearby. It stuns if you're not mounted yourself. We killed her a few times and then reset it by getting out of the instance and entering again.

As to Paletress, her Confession appears time based rather than health based. We've had it hit between 60% and 30%. The first time we had some issues there - Fear + Renew ticking on add = not good. Shamans are golden here, for tremor and purge.

Ignorance can be solved with a book. Stupidity requires a shotgun and a shovel.

On the trash before Paletress/Eadric, mind controlling the last add in one of the 3 pulls is apparently a bad idea and breaks the script. Had to wait for a soft reset to finish the zone on heroic. Luckily it proceeded where we left off instead of making us redo the jousting phase.